


The Sermon

by ussnicole



Series: The Gospel of Saint Jimmy [3]
Category: Green Day
Genre: Blasphemy, Depression, Gen, Hate, Inspiration, Jesus of Suburbia - Freeform, Love, Mentions of Suicide, Peace, Personal Reflection, Saint Jimmy - Freeform, Sarcasm, Songfic, War, drug usage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-17
Updated: 2017-11-17
Packaged: 2019-02-03 12:23:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12748245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ussnicole/pseuds/ussnicole
Summary: She screams in silence.The gospel of Saint Jimmy, according to a self-pronounced outcast.





	The Sermon

**Author's Note:**

> For Victoria and the Alex to my Jack.

There’s a lot of bullshit surrounding the “legend” of Saint Jimmy. If you can call it that. There’s Green Day’s story – the ambiguous, punchy, raw ballad that spans across an album and leaves much to interpretation. There’s Billie Joe’s story – damn, that kid idolized him. There’s the parents’ story – they hated him with a passion, “that good-for-nothing hooligan.” It’s kind of like the bible, honestly; people heard about Jimmy and interpreted whatever the fuck they wanted. Whatever they needed. I guess in a way that’s what he would have wanted.

I’m not going to pretend to know anyone else’s story about Jimmy but my own, and that’s the one I’m going to tell. I can’t really promise an honest narrative because I am the biggest liar I know, but what I’m writing now will be the truth as best as I know it. Truth and I, we have a really shitty relationship. I can promise some sex, some drugs (if you count caffeine and painkillers as drugs, because that’s about as hardcore as I get), and a lot of rock and roll. I can also promise some teen angst and some super terrible decisions and a lot of tears and therapy, but that’s all in good fun, right? I’m not dead yet, anyway.

So… right. The word of Saint Jimmy according to me. Hallelujah, hallelujah. The worst part of this whole thing is that I go to church every Sunday. Super Catholic and everything. I’m probably headed straight to hell when I die, but they tell me people who kill themselves don’t go to heaven anyway, so my chances were slim from the get go.

I guess the beginning is back in middle school, but I’ll skim over this shit. I never fit in, yadda yadda. Nobody liked me, yadda yadda. I’d like to interject here to say that I am dramatic and a liar (as I have already explained). People liked me. I had friends. I had a best friend, in fact, and I played sports with the guys at recess and I had crushes on all of them. I shit you not. Name a guy from my old class and I can pretty much guarantee I had a crush on him at some point.

That’s not the point though. The point is, I didn’t fit in with the elite group, the populars, and that’s what killed me. They were so pretty, and so rich, and so lucky with the guys, and they went to Tahoe on the weekends and Hawaii over spring break. I lived on the wrong side of the river and I went to Washington state for vacations and I played sports with the boys and I was just too loud or too weird or too whatever to click, and so I was stuck on the outside.

There was bullying, sure, but not the kind that people think matters. No, all I got was the cold shoulders and not getting invited places and the silent treatment when I would walk up to a group that was already talking. I wasn’t really allowed at certain lunch tables, and I wasn’t into the newest music, and I wore shorts for fuck’s sake, not the skirt. I was a disaster from the beginning. I got detention all the time for talking or being violent or some other stupid reason and I tried so. Damn. Hard. To. Fit. In.

It’s kind of pathetic looking back, but what can I say. A part of me still wants to be pretty, rich, and in love with a different boy every week. I guess I’ll have to settle for being plain, perpetually broke, and miserable. There’s an elite club, you know; you have to hate yourself just enough to not care anymore but not enough to off yourself. It’s a very fine line.

Middle school ended with a lovely fiasco where one of my crushes pretended to like me back for three years straight. All he really wanted was sex but we hadn’t really gotten the mechanics of sexting down at that age and besides, my phone didn’t even have data yet. No pictures for me! I threatened to kill myself at the end of 7th or 8th grade – I know, starting young. Like I told you, flair for the dramatic. It’s an occupation more than a character trait at this point. To be fair, that’s how I learned I wouldn’t be getting any of those souvenir scars that kids collect on their wrists; at a whopping zero, my pain tolerance is basically nonexistent. My parents told me I was crazy and sent me to group therapy – which did nothing but terrify me into thinking I was not depressed. I stuck to eating too much and then skipping meals and pretending I was anorexic. Couldn’t do that either – I like food too much.

When I graduated I cried, but I’m not sure why. I cry at a lot of things, so at this point it doesn’t even surprise me. Hi, nice to meet you, my talents include crying at everything, being dramatic, and lying. Wanna be friends? Anyway, I thought high school was gonna be better, all sunshine and roses.

Boy was I fuckin’ wrong.

High school is the same shit show, only instead of 20 people hating you now it’s more like 1000. Of course, if you walk around blaring pop punk music out of a portable speaker you really don’t give them a chance to like you. I was trying to make a point to everyone that I was better off, happy even. I think all I proved was that I was, am, and forever shall be fucking annoying. I’ll take it and wear that shit like a badge of honor.

This is where the music comes in. Going into high school, in my crusade to be liked and accepted by the popular crowd, I listened to the radio. My favorite band was One Direction and I could sing the top 40 off the top of my head. It didn’t make anyone like me more, but I felt cool. However, I met my brother’s ex girlfriend Olivia and a few older girls and my eyes were opened to the world of punk, rock, and metal. I got into Green Day again and never looked back. I still remember Olivia showing me a song off Warning called Blood, Sex, and Booze. Every time I hear it, it takes me back to a simpler time before I hated Olivia and had so many guy problems I felt like an actual teenager.

Dad owned American Idiot at that time, and I took it upon myself to listen to it on repeat until the lyrics I could understand were ingrained in my mind. Jesus of Suburbia and the title track American Idiot were immediate favorites, and they became anthems of my high school career.

It was around this time that Billie Joe’s version of Jimmy’s story came to my attention, and I looked up to that leather jacket clad, cussing crusader. Jimmy was everything I ever wanted to be: apathetic, cynical, untouchable, angry, and avoided. He was a loner and he liked it, and I, a lonely girl who hated silence, wanted nothing more than to learn how to love the quiet.

Sophomore year hit me like a truck; I practically failed Chemistry both semesters and the work load steamrolled right over me. I hardly had any time to follow Jimmy’s example; I was so busy I couldn’t even hate the world. Junior year had its own trials and tribulations, but that’s when it really began to stick. In my own way, I was becoming Jimmy.

I drank Monster energy drinks religiously and popped painkillers like candy – my take on soda pop and Ritalin, like from Jesus of Suburbia. My family wasn’t broken but it sure was dysfunctional, so I had my fair share of home problems. I didn’t eat lunch, I never did homework, and I played my music too loud in the halls. I sang the intro to Letterbomb like it was my own personal anthem: _nobody likes me, everyone left me, they’re all out without me, having fun_. A lot of the time, the last half of that statement was (and continues to be) true. I’ll get over it somehow.

For my seventeenth birthday my friends all pitched in and bought me a pair of seven inch stripper heels from some sketchy website, and when they came I walked around like I had a point to prove – at 6 feet, 1 inch tall. I preached religiously against the preppy, entitled rich kids I had grown up idolizing. Suddenly they weren’t perfect, and they didn’t have it all. They drank to feel something and their money didn’t make up for a lack of personality. You could cover your eyes and they all talked the same; bored, shallow, and stupid. My admiration soured to bitter dislike and often pity.

There was also a degree of jealousy; my deep seated self esteem issues stemmed both from their rejection and my persistently terrible luck with the opposite sex. While they had no problems finding boys to go on dates with and take to dances, I had no one. There were crushes, of course, but like a difficult maze I always found myself at a dead end, scratching my head and wondering where I went wrong. After a while, I gave up. The depression was back in full force, but I said nothing to my parents. The sadness became comfortable, familiar, an old friend who never let me down when all else failed.

Then came the concussion. I got whacked over the head with a lacrosse stick in practice in mid-March and was out of basically everything for two months. I almost killed myself a few times; when you’re so bored you could cry but you’re literally not allowed to do anything, you get pretty desperate for distractions. I slept a lot too, which was new and exciting for a part time insomniac.

Which brings me around to all of my self diagnosed problems. I’m not sure if these count as lies, since I feel like I do have all of them to a degree, but I haven’t been diagnosed for any of them. Let’s see, there’s the depression, the insomnia, the ADD, and I’m pretty sure I could pull some more problems out of my ass if you gave me enough time. All that’s really wrong with me is that I care too much. I haven’t gotten that part of being Jimmy down, but I’ve certainly got the martyr complex. More on that later.

Anyway, I failed my pre calculus final but managed to scrape through the second semester with good grades – mostly because they were frozen after my concussion. I spent summer halfheartedly searching for a job and staying in trouble like I always did. I managed to get hit by a car four days after getting cleared from my concussion. I wasn’t even wearing a helmet, and I cracked my head on the asphalt of the street. I slept a lot and had a lot of headaches and didn’t go to the doctor. Instead I downed painkillers on a daily basis and avoided loud noises and bright lights – unless I was going to a concert.

That was the summer of concerts; I saw The Wrecks, Swmrs, Waterparks, All Time Low, some country artists, and a shit ton of bands at Warped Tour. Warped Tour. Now there’s a story – but not the one I’m telling here. I’ll leave that to the clean narrative with the ambiguous “she” character and the sterilized explanations. This is essentially Saint Jimmy’s story, and I’m just giving you background on me. Sorry. I swear it’ll get more interesting in a little bit.

What is important from Warped Tour is that I met three new guys, which was both terrible and amazing. Taylor, Lennon, and Mocha. Well, to be fair, I didn’t actually meet Mocha. We just talked over Instagram. Lennon comes first I guess; we were going to hook up and then he called it off. I probably would have done something stupid that night if Taylor hadn’t stayed up talking to me. It wasn’t so much that Lennon was an asshole, telling me he had never wanted to hook up when it was his idea in the first place; it was more that I couldn’t find a boyfriend and then this, that I couldn’t even find a boy to simply fuck. It was beginning to look like something was fundamentally wrong with me. Mocha and I flirted off and on, but there wasn’t much behind it. I knew in the back of my mind that if I ever needed a casual hook up I could call him up, but I never took up the offer.

At the same time, I began to get to know Taylor. He had a girlfriend in Texas so I knew that he was off limits, but he was also the most attractive person I had ever had the privilege of meeting in person (and he liked to tell me he loved me and missed me) so I ended up falling for him. Stupid of me, I know. I am nothing if not a complete and utter idiot.

Now on to the sex bit of this train wreck of a story. It’s not as exciting as I make it sound, really; just a blowjob between strangers on a long car ride to a party full of people I didn’t really know. I was bored and lonely so I started to talk to a guy I had met through a friend freshman year; Hunter was her ex, and we hit it off. It was strictly friends with benefits at first, but he got attached pretty quickly. We sexted a lot, which is exhausting at the best of times.

I’m going to take this moment to interject a sad truth: I never wanted any of what we did, except for the attention. I spent my entire life looking for a boyfriend, someone to cuddle and hold hands with and hang out with. When that became a pipe dream rather than something to look forward to, I looked for the affection I wasn’t getting elsewhere, and I stopped caring where it came from. If all I could find was sex, I was going to take what I could get.

I let myself get pressured into situations I didn’t want to be in, but how could anyone know? I wasn’t going to tell them. My confidence skyrocketed because I was sick and didn’t eat for three days, and suddenly I had lost seven pounds. I was thinner than I had ever been, more unhealthy than usual, and I had someone telling me he wanted to fuck me on a daily basis. It was a house of cards at best, and a nightmare the rest of the time. I was so caught up in it that I thought I was happy.

I invited him to an annual football game, a huge event for local high schools, and he came. It was my first time meeting him, but we had talked so much that it wasn’t as awkward as it could have been. Which isn’t saying much, because I was still nervous and not really sure how to act. Here I was, a romantic at heart, stuck in a relationship that was and would forever be purely physical. A few lines I shouldn’t have crossed were crossed that night, after the game was over and we were racing down the highway to the after party. He swerved once when I was taking off his belt and my life flashed before my eyes. I refuse to listen to Avenged Sevenfold or Five Finger Death Punch ever again.

He gave me his sweatshirt and I wore it like a security blanket, pretending like what we had was something more than a horny teenage boy and a desperate, lonely girl. Between his anger issues, consistent drinking, and possessive behavior, I was glad he lived as far away from me as he did or what we had could have easily become an abusive relationship.

Now, this is where it gets really interesting. My parents took my phone one Sunday night because I wasn’t doing the laundry, and that’s when shit really hit the fan. This is where the “comedy and tragedy” bit of Saint Jimmy’s story comes in for me. Let me tell you, your father finding out you’re calling a teenage boy ‘daddy’ is something you never want to try to explain. They found out about everything, and when I say everything – well, they found out about Lennon, and then Kent (who I had grinded on and made out with at the country concert), and all about Hunter.

I cried for four days straight. Dad, in a bout of anger, said “I _loved_ you,” and his words stuck with me. He also liked to use analogies like “You put a bullet in the head of my innocent daughter.” If I didn’t feel like killing myself already, I sure did after that. I had to take a pregnancy test because they didn’t believe that I hadn’t had sex, which seemed sort of pointless because just because you aren’t pregnant doesn’t mean you’re not a virgin, but I wasn’t about to point this out. I had a therapy appointment that Monday, and also had to talk to the priest at my church and the dean at my school. I slept better than I had in weeks, which I can probably chalk up to the fact that I wasn’t staying up late to sext with Hunter and that crying really wears me out.

People had been living vicariously through me since freshman year, when I wore heeled combat boots every day and had huge headphones that blocked out all noise. Now I was being martyred for my sins, and for everyone else’s. It was a painful experience, and one that I never want to relive. I’m not sure I would survive a second time. I felt like the Jesus of Suburbia, sitting on my crucifix with nails in my hands and a thorn in my side. I had learned enough by that time not to say anything even if I wanted to kill myself; that just turns into an uncomfortable conversation first with parents, and then with a therapist.

Throughout everything, I began to lean heavily on Taylor. We had talked off and on, hanging out at Starbucks occasionally and keeping in touch, but I told him everything that had happened and he came to Starbucks the Friday after everything had happened with Amber to make sure I was okay. While we were hanging out he told me that he and Amber were going to a concert in LA that night, and that they had meant to leave at 8; because he wanted to check on me and make sure I was still somewhat alive, he made Amber postpone their departure time by an hour. When they dropped me off at school after hanging out, he picked me up when he hugged me. I cried, not because I was sad, but because no one had ever gone that far out of their way for me. It was a strange and overwhelming feeling.

I also started going to a therapy group, which was interesting. I was reluctant at first because of my first experience with group therapy, but the group actually turned out okay. They fed us too much candy and we talked about depression and anxiety and how to handle them healthily. Most of it was lost on me anyway; you’ve got to want to get better before you can actually start healing. I have grown so comfortable with pain and sadness that I don’t know who I would be without them.

The line between Jimmy and I blurred; I sometimes wonder if he ever was a real person, or if he is just a personification of both the strength people wish they possessed and the ending they fear and yet foresee. And with that, we come to the end of the personal section. I think that’s quite enough of me, and I’m sorry if you’re sick of it by now but quite honestly I don’t give a fuck. (This, ladies and gentlemen, is without a doubt another lie.) But to be honest, if you’re sick of reading about me then why did you come this far? Morbid curiosity? Fair enough: me too. I think morbid curiosity is what’s keeping me alive.

But anyway, Saint Jimmy. I have never met him. He’s a character, a myth, a legend of Suburbia. If he personally was in my life, I’d probably be madly in love with him. As it is, I don’t think that Jimmy ever actually existed – but don’t get me wrong. He definitely did, I just don’t think his name was Jimmy. I think he was several people who came into Billie Joe Armstrong’s life and inspired him.

I think Jimmy was the kid who killed himself in sophomore year because his dad liked to use him as a punching bag when he got drunk.

I think Jimmy was the only girl in the pit at the rock show, flailing her arms and shoving her way through moshers and metal heads to prove that she actually belonged there.

I think Jimmy was the protester marching in the streets downtown, yelling for change; the six year old boy wondering why daddy never came home; the high school dropout huddled under a bridge snorting cocaine; the middle aged punk rocker, forced to retire from the only life he’d ever known.

Jimmy was anyone and everyone who took a chance, stood out from the crowd, or was forced to the outside. Jimmy was the abused, the ignored, the bitter, the cynical, the outcasts.

And this is where he comes into my life.

Jimmy is Victoria, Kate, all the people who have dealt with bullying just like I have and lived to tell the tale. The ones who soldier through each day with a smile and kind words for friends, never acknowledging their own suffering or pain. The ones who put everyone first at their own expense. The ones who are underappreciated and sidelined.

Jimmy is Gaby, Lauren, all the people who are completely and utterly unafraid of being themselves. The ones who aren’t afraid to stand out from everyone else, even if it means that they don’t fit in, aren’t accepted. The ones who are fiercely loyal and come through for their friends, no matter what. The ones who are taken for granted and marginalized.

I see Jimmy – to a degree – in each and everyone one of my friends. They inspire me to be better, to stand straighter, to yell and play my music louder. Unbeknownst to them, as much as they look up to me as their own Jimmy, they are all endless sources of inspiration.


End file.
